Exploring the effect of addressing social injustices as a student affairs professional

This autoethnographic study is an intimate exploration of how student affairs professionals may be affected by working with students experiencing social injustices on campus. As subject and researcher, I used my unique story, along with interview responses from three university community members, to guide the reader through an examination of the culture of student affairs. This study illustrates how student affairs professionals may be transformed personally and professionally while advocating for students\u27 equitable rights. To collect the stories, I transcribed the university community members\u27 responses and my personal experience from audio voice digital recordings. In addition, data collection methods included reflecting upon personal email correspondences, written reflections, campus studies, newspaper articles, and research memos. Although each student affairs professional has unique experiences, the self-reflection and analysis within this autoethnography provides an overview of the personal and professional transformation that occurs when advocating for students facing social injustices on campus. Findings indicated the significance of role models, professional boundaries, and social justice advocacy in the culture of student affairs. Furthermore, student affairs professionals may experience empathic distress and compassion fatigue when witnessing students facing social injustices. The themes extracted from the findings indicate the importance of role models, barriers discovered while advocating for social justice, and a possible connection between student affairs, social justice, and compassion fatigue. Finally, the implications of this study strengthen the need for student affairs professionals to be aware of their emotional health and for institutions to embed inclusivity for students within the campus environment by shedding hegemonic practices

A Sociological Analysis Of Chronic Poverty Within The Appalachian Region

The Appalachian region holds immense historical value and has been an area of vast natural resources since the formation of the United States. The Appalachian region has also been commonly associated with crippling poverty and negative stereotypes for hundreds of years. It is important to examine the historical context of the region in an attempt to understand what could cause devastating poverty, while at the same time providing immense profits to outside corporate interests. This paper examines the social, political and economic causes of the chronic poverty found within the region. Different theories of poverty and the history of the political and economic discourse of the area will be examined in an attempt to explain how the internal socioeconomic conditions of the region could lead to the creation of chronic poverty

Interoception and Autonomic Correlates during Social Interactions. Implications for Anorexia

The aim of this study is to investigate the bodily-self in Restrictive Anorexia, focusing on two basic aspects related to the bodily self: autonomic strategies in social behavior, in which others’ social desirability features, and social cues (e.g., gaze) are modulated, and interoception (i.e., the sensitivity to stimuli originating inside the body). Furthermore, since previous studies carried out on healthy individuals found that interoception seems to contribute to the autonomic regulation of social behavior, as measured by Respiratory Sinus Arrhythmia (RSA), we aimed to explore this link in anorexia patients, whose ability to perceive their bodily signal seems to be impaired. To this purpose, we compared a group of anorexia patients (ANg; restrictive type) with a group of Healthy Controls (HCg) for RSA responses during both a resting state and a social proxemics task, for their explicit judgments of comfort in social distances during a behavioral proxemics task, and for their Interoceptive Accuracy (IA). The results showed that ANg displayed significantly lower social disposition and a flattened autonomic reactivity during the proxemics task, irrespective of the presence of others’ socially desirable features or social cues. Moreover, unlike HCg, the autonomic arousal of ANg did not guide behavioral judgments of social distances. Finally, IA was strictly related to social disposition in both groups, but with opposite trends in ANg. We conclude that autonomic imbalance and its altered relationship with interoception might have a crucial role in anorexia disturbances

Interoception across Modalities: On the Relationship between Cardiac Awareness and the Sensitivity for Gastric Functions

The individual sensitivity for ones internal bodily signals (“interoceptive awareness”) has been shown to be of relevance for a broad range of cognitive and affective functions. Interoceptive awareness has been primarily assessed via measuring the sensitivity for ones cardiac signals (“cardiac awareness”) which can be non-invasively measured by heartbeat perception tasks. It is an open question whether cardiac awareness is related to the sensitivity for other bodily, visceral functions. This study investigated the relationship between cardiac awareness and the sensitivity for gastric functions in healthy female persons by using non-invasive methods. Heartbeat perception as a measure for cardiac awareness was assessed by a heartbeat tracking task and gastric sensitivity was assessed by a water load test. Gastric myoelectrical activity was measured by electrogastrography (EGG) and subjective feelings of fullness, valence, arousal and nausea were assessed. The results show that cardiac awareness was inversely correlated with ingested water volume and with normogastric activity after water load. However, persons with good and poor cardiac awareness did not differ in their subjective ratings of fullness, nausea and affective feelings after drinking. This suggests that good heartbeat perceivers ingested less water because they subjectively felt more intense signals of fullness during this lower amount of water intake compared to poor heartbeat perceivers who ingested more water until feeling the same signs of fullness. These findings demonstrate that cardiac awareness is related to greater sensitivity for gastric functions, suggesting that there is a general sensitivity for interoceptive processes across the gastric and cardiac modality